Taking the Girl out of the City

After nearly 20 years as host of CityLine, Marilyn Denis is leaving City-TV.

The Toronto radio and TV favorite confirmed her career move this morning when I was a guest on Roger, Rick and Marilyn’s ever-popular CHUM-FM morning show.

Host Roger Ashby was kind enough to invite me on to blab about my book, Truth and Rumors: The Reality Behind TV’s Most Famous Myths. We got into some of the more recent TV rumours, including some tall tales from reality shows such as The Bachelor (did Bachelor No. 2 Aaron really make three contestants pregnant?), Joe Millionaire (was Evan Marriott really the heir to the Mariott hotel fortune?) and The Amazing Race (did Rob and Amber get robbed by CBS when that plane made a U-turn at the gate?). You can hear our five-minute radio chat here.

Denis, always loaded with juicy Hollywood gossip, dropped her own bomb to me after the broadcast. After 19 seasons, her City-TV days are numbered.

The chain of events leading up to this move is a bit complicated, but there is a happy ending for Denis’ fans. CTV’s recent takeover of the CHUM stations was only approved by the CRTC once CTV divested itself of flagship Toronto station City (sold to Rogers, Denis’ current bosses.) CTV kept CHUM’s many specialty and digital stations (Space, MuchMusic, Bravo, etc) plus the regional network of A-channel stations.

CTV CEO Ivan Fecan, however, was not about to let Denis–one of City’s main assets–get away. Since CHUM-FM is now a CTV property, it made sense to keep Denis in the family. So the speculation is that Denis–still doing CityLine, for now–will return next fall headlining her own brand new CTV daytime talk show. It’s a smart move for the network, which hasn’t had a home grown daytime talk show success since another former CityLine host–Dini Petty–packed it in over ten years ago.